Frémont’s Fourth Expedition — 1848, Frozen in the San Juans

Summary

In the winter of 1848-49, John C. Frémont — the celebrated "Pathfinder" of the American West, lately disgraced by a court-martial — set out to redeem his name with a privately financed expedition. His backers, including his father-in-law Senator Thomas Hart Benton, wanted proof that a central transcontinental railroad could be pushed along the 38th parallel through the central Rockies and crossed even in deep winter. To prove it, Frémont resolved to do the one thing every experienced mountain man warned against: take a party of thirty-three men and well over a hundred mules straight up into the high San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado in December.

It was a decision made against the explicit counsel of his own guide. The aging trapper Bill Williams — "Old Bill" — knew this country, and the men later recalled his unease at the route and the season. Frémont pressed on anyway, into snow that fell deeper and colder than anything the plains-bred mules could endure. By late December the expedition was bogged in drifts on the high divides above the Rio Grande, the animals dying in their tracks, the men hauling baggage by hand through chest-deep snow at well over 11,000 feet.

When it was over, ten of the thirty-three men were dead — frozen, starved, or simply unable to take another step — and the survivors had been reduced to eating their dead mules, their belts, their rawhide, and, by the darkest accounts, possibly one another. The mountains they died in are the homeland of the Nuche (Ute) people, who had hunted and wintered in the San Juans for generations and who would never have attempted what Frémont attempted. The survivors straggled out in broken groups to Taos, in present-day New Mexico, where Kit Carson and others took them in.

It was one of the worst exploration disasters of the era, and unlike most, it was almost entirely self-inflicted. Frémont never fully accepted the blame, hinting that his guide had led them astray; the survivors who left written accounts — chiefly the artist Richard Kern, whose brother Benjamin died on the mountain — told a different story, of a commander who would not turn back.

Timeline

The Setup

John Charles Frémont came to the San Juans with everything to prove. Through the 1840s his earlier government surveys, written up with the help of his wife Jessie Benton Frémont, had made him a national hero — the "Pathfinder" whose reports lured thousands west. But his role in the conquest of California had ended in a feud with General Stephen Watts Kearny and a court-martial in 1847 that convicted him of mutiny and disobedience. President Polk remitted the sentence, but Frémont resigned in fury. This fourth expedition, launched in the autumn of 1848 and paid for largely by private St. Louis money and his father-in-law Senator Benton, was his bid to vault back into glory by surveying a winter-passable rail route along the 38th parallel.

The party that gathered near Westport in October numbered thirty-three men, many of them veterans of his earlier surveys — including the three Kern brothers of Philadelphia (Benjamin, a physician, and the artists Edward and Richard), the topographer Charles Preuss, and seasoned hands like Alexis Godey, Henry King, and Thomas Breckenridge. They brought more than a hundred mules. At Bent's Fort and at Pueblo on the upper Arkansas, the men who knew the high country tried to talk Frémont out of his timing. The snows were already deep and early, they warned, and the mountains ahead were merciless.

Frémont hired Bill Williams as guide — a legendary, eccentric old trapper who knew the southern Rockies as well as any white man alive. Yet the choice of route over the high San Juans, into the teeth of a brutal winter, was Frémont's own. He believed that to prove a railroad route practical year-round, he had to cross when the snow was at its worst. The expedition turned its face to the mountains in early December, climbing toward the headwaters of the Rio Grande as the temperature fell and the drifts rose.

The Disaster

Disaster came on slowly, then all at once. As the party pushed up the Rio Grande and into the high country of the San Juans — likely onto the flanks of the La Garita Mountains — the snow deepened past anything the mules could manage. The animals floundered, their legs cut by crusted drifts, and began to die of cold and starvation. The men broke trail by hand, packing baggage forward through snow that in places reached their chests, in temperatures that plunged far below zero. Frostbite took fingers and feet. Progress slowed to a few hundred yards a day, then stopped.

By the days around Christmas 1848 the expedition was hopelessly mired on the heights, more than 11,000 feet up, with the mules nearly all dead or dying and the food gone. The men killed and ate the frozen mules, gnawed parched corn, and finally boiled their rawhide ropes, parfleches, and moccasin soles for nourishment. Frémont at last recognized that the route was impossible and ordered a retreat back down toward the Rio Grande — but by then the party was scattered, starving, and freezing, with men too weak to keep up beginning to fall behind in the snow.

In a desperate gamble, Frémont sent a relief party of four ahead to the New Mexican settlements for help: Bill Williams, Dr. Benjamin Kern's friend the veteran Henry King, Thomas Breckenridge, and the trapper William Creutzfeldt. They became lost and snowbound on the lower Rio Grande, and Henry King starved to death before they could reach anyone. When word of their failure trickled back, Frémont set out himself with Godey and a few others to find help, leaving the bulk of the men strung out along the river to save themselves as best they could. It was in that interval — men alone, immobilized, dying one by one in the cold — that the worst of the dying happened, and that the grimmest rumors of cannibalism among the abandoned took root.

The Ordeal

What the stragglers endured in the last weeks of December and into January was a slow, scattered death by cold and hunger along the frozen Rio Grande. Men sat down in the snow and did not rise. Richard Kern's diary and the later memoir of Micajah McGehee record the grinding arithmetic of it — boiled rawhide, the last of the parched corn, the constant arithmetic of who could still walk. Of the thirty-three who had started, ten would not come down off the mountains alive. They died of starvation and exposure, strung out over miles of river bottom, the strong stumbling past the bodies of the weak.

Frémont himself, pushing ahead with Godey and a handful of others, reached the Red River settlements and then Taos. There the famed scout Kit Carson — Frémont's companion on earlier expeditions — took him into his own home to recover. Carson and the Taos community organized relief, and Alexis Godey turned around and went back up the frozen river with mules and provisions to bring out the men still clinging to life. Godey's rescue, hard and fast, is credited with saving most of the twenty-three survivors.

The survivors came down in pieces, frostbitten, skeletal, and bitter. Some, including the Kerns and Old Bill Williams, were so angered by Frémont's conduct — and by what they felt was his attempt to shift blame onto his guide — that they refused to continue with him to California, choosing instead to recover in Taos. That decision would have its own grim coda: when Williams and Benjamin Kern returned up the mountain in the spring of 1849 to recover the expedition's abandoned baggage and instruments, both men were killed, in an encounter generally attributed to a Ute (Nuche) party, on the homeland the expedition had so recklessly violated.

How They Survived

Rescue & After

Frémont, characteristically, did not let the catastrophe stop him. After recovering in Taos he reorganized the survivors who would still follow him, took a southern route, and reached California in the spring of 1849 — where, by spectacular luck, gold was discovered on land he had acquired, making him briefly wealthy. He went on to become one of California's first senators and, in 1856, the first presidential nominee of the new Republican Party. The man who had buried ten of his own in the San Juans rose higher than ever.

The dead did not all stay buried in dignity. The rumors of cannibalism among the abandoned stragglers — never proven, fiercely contested, but persistent in the survivors' own private accounts — clung to the expedition's memory. Frémont's published report blamed the guide, Bill Williams, for leading them astray; the Kern brothers and others bitterly rejected that, insisting the route and the timing had been Frémont's alone. The historical consensus has come down firmly on the survivors' side: this was a commander's disaster.

Its coda was the death of Old Bill Williams himself. In the spring of 1849 he and Dr. Benjamin Kern went back up to recover the expedition's cached baggage and were killed in the mountains, an end usually attributed to a Ute party. The San Juans had taken ten men in winter and two more in spring — a toll exacted on the homeland of the Nuche by an expedition that should never have entered it in that season at all.

Lessons

References

• Frémont's Fourth Expedition Wikipedia
• John C. Frémont Wikipedia
• Bill Williams (mountain man) Wikipedia
• Ute people Wikipedia